In Memoriam: Gail Ingram (1924-2007)

December 21, 2007

There were a fair number of women writers in the early days of television, but not so many that they don’t all deserve some measure of credit for their perseverance and patience in the face of discrimination. I’ve made a concentrated effort to include as many as possible in my research, and Gail Ingram was the first. Long retired and living in obscurity in San Diego when I contacted her by phone, Gail, who died on April 13, told me some remarkable stories.

Born Gail Austrian in New York City, she went to Vassar and then got a job as a receptionist at a radio station in 1948. From that she transitioned into writing “bridges” between program segments, and then into freelance writing. Gail married Harry Ingram, a successful writer for The Shadow, Big Story, and other shows. They started to write as a team, and to transition into live television.

Then, in 1952, Harry Ingram dropped dead in their Connecticut backyard at the age of thirty-seven, after suffering a heart attack. Suddenly, Gail was a single parent and one of the few solo women writers working in television. Fortunately, the producers of Big Story, who knew the Ingrams from radio, were willing to use her on her own, and she ran up a number of credits on the TV version of that series. From there she became a staff writer for Mama, under the wary eye of the prickly head writer Frank Gabrielson, whom Ingram outed to me as one of TV’s first (to use a succession of modern terms) openly gay showrunners.

During the ’50s Gail wrote for anthologies like Tales of Tomorrow, Robert Montgomery Presents, Matinee Theatre, and, after moving to Los Angeles, G.E. Theatre, One Step Beyond, and The Millionaire. During our chat, she recalled the premise of The Millionaire, and then told me how, while a single mother writing for the show, her son asked why John Beresford Tipton didn’t bring her a briefcase containing a million dollars.

The Millionaire was produced by Don Fedderson, who remembered Gail when he launched a family-friendly sitcom called My Three Sons. It ran forever and Gail wrote more than a dozen scripts for it, but apparently her more significant contribution was as a longterm, uncredited rewrite consultant. Even after she left the business and moved to San Diego to concentrate on her family, she continued to polish scripts for My Three Sons – especially those by younger writers, like cast member Don Grady – and possibly other Fedderson series (Family Affair, etc.). Evidently disillusioned with the TV factory, or the quality of its output, Gail turned down offers to write for The Beverly Hillbillies and My Mother the Car. The last credit of hers that I could verify was on the 1965-66 sitcom Tammy.

Gail didn’t buy into it when I asked if she’d been treated badly by a sexist TV industry. “If you could produce, they would buy your script,” she told me. But she added a great caveat about the glass ceiling. Sometime during the ’50s, the writer Robert J. Shaw was a tenant of hers in Connecticut, and when they compared notes they discovered they’d gotten assignments on the same show, and that Shaw had been paid more for no apparent reason other than that he was male.

Unfortunately, my conversation with Gail won’t ever appear among the oral histories published on my website, because it was the victim of a tape recorder malfunction. (I realize that, after the mishaps I related in my posts on David Shaw and Lonny Chapman, I run the risk of depicting myself as the Inspector Clouseau of TV historians.) I’d always meant to call her again after some time had passed and try to recapture lightning in a bottle, or perhaps to drop down to San Diego and meet her in person, but she became ill before I got around to it. That’s another link in my own personal Jacob Marley chain of missed opportunities, and it weighs heavily on me indeed.